Kamikaze Midget said:
It was the first metaphor that sprung to mind, and it seems *surprisingly* apt. If it's the art we want, why at the moment is 80%-ish of the money we plunk down on a copy of the art going to the copers, and only a small fraction going to the artists? The money isn't (largely) going to the artists, it isn't going to the individuals whose services we want. It's going to the individuals who organize and secure those services. This seems entirely backwards. I shouldn't be supporting an *industry* when I buy a CD -- I should be supporting the creator.
There is a surprisingly simple answer to this: because without the suits, the artist would make far less money than they would with them. The suits provide value, whether you believe it or not. In the modern world, producing things is generally much easier than distributing them.
IMHO, these are all good things. Ug not standing to make a million Dino-Dollars from the buffallo he painted on the wall didn't stop him from doing it. There, ideally, should be a monetary incentive to produce art. But that incentive should come from the community, from the public, from the people who will recieve and interpret the art. Not from guys in suits who copy it.
The incentive ultimately does come from the public. The "guys in suits" want to make money. They can only do that by selling stuff the public wants to buy. If the public wanted yodeling CDs, you better believe that we'd get plenty of them.
And I don't think that the incentive should be enough to be able to "live off of art." It should absolutely be something you want to do for it's own sake, not because you will survive off of it. Kinda like the RPG market right now...which is that way specifically because one major company gave up a large percentage of its product for free reproduction. 
Then I suppose you had better be ready for a lot less copyrighted materials to be available for you to enjoy. Because you have just driven a lot of creative people out of the market by making it not worth their time to put their material out.
Free music doesn't sound like it's copyright to me. It sounds specifically as if it is an exception to the copyright rules: you can take this product and distribute it for free over the airwaves. You don't have to pay to release it. Or if you do pay, you pay not by charging the listener, but by charging advertisors (which is also a huge part of this New Economy anyway).
Legally you can't distribute it for free. This is one of the areas where compulsory licenses come into play.
Internet and satelite allow for musical options, but they are still forced into pigeonholes based on what the suits dictate as genres, because genres are easier to market than bands. You have the "classical" station, the "top 40" station, the "blues" station, the "oldies" station, the "rock" station, the "country" station, the "electronic" station, etc. These are all artificial categories; these categories do stymie creativity.
Actually, they are categories that the market has come up with, based upon the revealed preferences of consumers. They like things bundled, because it means they will listen to what they like.
Because if what I release as new music is not easily fit into one of these categories, it is rejected, and the reason is because of the suits. Because the way for their business of copying things to make money is to copy something that people will want a lot of copies of, and if it doesn't fit into a genre, if it breaks new ground, if it doesn't fit into an old pattern, the numbers say it is a gamble at best, and you don't run a business on gambles.
Tell that to Jobs and Gates. Their entire business model was a gamble, and it made them incredibly wealthy. Most wealth is generated by risk-takers who take a big gamble on a product.
I've never myself made the claim that copyright is worthless evil grumble grumble, though I have pointed out why others think so (namely, that saying only certain people have the right to copy something is like saying only certain people have the right to have children).
So, not letting you have the product of my work is like not letting you have children? That's silly. A more apt analogy would be that not letting you make copies of my work is like not letting you raise my children. Make your own work, or have your own children.
In fact, I said that I think the idea of copyright is probably a good way to encourage artists (I think that limited, temporary, creator-owned, and nonstransferrable copyright is a pretty solid way to do this).
Nontransferrable pretty much makes copyright worthless from the get-go.
That doesn't mean that it's the only way. And it obviously isn't the right way anymore, with all that it has done to hurt those it was meant to protect. Perhaps the modern way of doing it is a perversion of the intentions of the old system, but it's important to address the issues as they exist today, rather than defend what exists today because it once had a good reason somewhere in the deep past.
I don't think it is obvious at all, and I don't think it hurts those it was meant to protect. It was meant to protect those who make works of authorship, and it does that still. And it remains the only economically viable way to make this work without putting the control of creating new works in the hands of wealthy patrons gratifying their own whims.
